This paper examines the panoramas of Athens to show how a modern audience creatively adapted the notion of Greece to its own purposes. Analyzing the paintings in terms of Picturesque art and of the rhetoric of visual representation, it asks what social and intellectual values underlie them. The results of this analysis show that the panoramas, so far from being merely forerunners in some sense of the photograph, were an expression of western liberal democratic thought, its disappointment at the existing condition of Greece, and its hopes for revolutionary change.